Next-Gen CASB Blog

Learnings from Week 2 of the Bitglass Beta: No Dragnets Please!

It is two weeks into the Bitglass Beta and we have IT pros from twenty different companies kicking it around. In week 1, we learned that users want mobility but don't care for MDM - even IT pros are not keen to have corporate tracking software on their personal mobile devices.

During the second week, we learned that users are most accepting of their employers securing and tracking corporate data. They fully appreciate that company emails and documents must be secured and tracked to comply with regulations, thwart the competition, or in some cases, block the prying eyes of criminals or foreign governments.

But every user and IT pro feels strongly that companies should not monitor their personal communications just because they chose BYOD. You can't switch countries if the NSA monitors your communications with their PRISM program. But you can switch employers.

Technologies that route ALL traffic from BYOD devices through corporate firewalls or proxies leave users angry at IT. Just because the company uses Google Apps, IT can't route all traffic to google.com through a corporate proxy that inspects personal gmail. As one IT professional at a global bank put it, they will not consider any technology that forms a "dragnet" for all user communication and cannot distinguish between corporate data and personal data.

Forcing end-users to submit to surveillance of personal communication does not lead to good outcomes. End-users will work around IT. And IT ends up with a bad rap.In short, no dragnets please!